Trouble among the toffs

Anne Chisholm reviews Snobs by Julian Fellowes

Anne Chisholm

12:01AM BST 06 Apr 2004

In the wake of his Oscar-winning screenplay for Gosford Park, an enjoyable if highly unrealistic film set in an English stately home, the actor and screenwriter Julian Fellowes has taken the bold step of writing a novel about goings-on among the aristocracy. In so doing, he is shamelessly trading on his own proclaimed credentials as a bit of a toff, who knows all about upper-class twits because he speaks the same language as they do.

Although set in the 1990s, Fellowes's tale of social climbing and sexual betrayal has a curiously old-fashioned, 1950-ish flavour, based as it is in a world where the Season still counts, stockbrokers and models are despised, and class matters more than celebrity or money.

His narrator, like himself, is a man with good connections who has taken up acting. From the wings, he observes the consequences when his friend Isabel introduces him to Edith Lavery, a pretty but socially insignificant girl who marries the narrator's acquaintance Charles Broughton, a dull but decent earl with estates in Norfolk and Sussex.

Edith does not love Charles, and is soon bored by country pursuits and his habit of saying thank you after sex. When their garden is used for a television series, the inevitable happens: Edith falls for Simon, a handsome, sexually proficient but shallow actor, and leaves Charles and life as a countess for what she thinks is true love. Meanwhile the narrator has himself made a much more sensible marriage, to Adela, a baronet's daughter who works for Christie's, wears corduroy knee breeches and can talk about shooting.

By the time Edith realises that she has made a mistake, she is also pregnant. Charles wants her back, however, and the drama, such as it is, concludes with Edith's victorious return to the stately home and the birth of a daughter accepted as her husband's.

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The trouble is that although Fellowes is an amusing writer with an ear for dialogue, his novel is emotionally anaemic. His literary mentors are clear; the cool narrator's voice owes much to Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, while his women characters, Edith and Isabel and Adela, as their names suggest, have their origins in the novels of Edith Wharton. By inviting such comparisons, Fellowes has made a grave mistake.